The Return

The final lines of the memoirs were the last written, and the hardest, not because the experience they describe is painful, but because what they point at resists language the way water resists being held in the hand. You can hold it briefly. You can describe what it feels like to hold it. What you cannot do is hand it to someone else in the same condition.

The return is not a destination you arrive at once and settle into. It is a practice, a sustained orientation of attention, cultivated day by day, in the middle of an ordinary life, in a body with a ringing in its ears and a mortgage and a place to be by nine.

The soul does not leave the world to find its source. It finds its source by attending to the world more completely than the world usually asks of it.

That is the whole of the practice, in the end. Not escape. Attention. The kind that notices what beauty is pointing at, what the ache has always known, what silence sounds like underneath the noise, and what another person's presence is actually asking of you. Practised daily, in an ordinary life, it is enough.